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Celebrity IELTS interviews no. 1: Momus

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I’ve been an IELTS examiner for over eight years. That’s a perfect English sentence, but it’s not in itself very interesting. Far more impressive is the fact that Nick Currie, also known as Momus, has made around 30 albums, written six novels, performed as an Unreliable Guide at various art festivals and biennali, produced reams of art criticism and a consistently compelling blog, and even written a food column for the Japan Times. All that makes him a fascinating subject for an interview, and I had the chance to do just that recently in the jaw-droppingly beautiful setting of the Istituto Svizzero in Rome (interview itself coming soon). Knowing that Nick’s father was an English teacher who brought up his family in Canada, Italy and Greece, I thought it would be fun to take advantage of the encounter to conduct another kind of interview, viz specifically an IELTS one, not because he’s planning to apply for an Australian visa or hoping to embark on a Business Studies course at Aston University*, but because I’m very interested in the question of how articulacy and what it’s probably not okay these days to call well-spokenness relates to language ability, education, personality and intelligence**. Nick happens to be a (problematic term coming up) ‘native speaker’ who is extremely articulate, engaging and intelligent, so I thought he might make a useful and entertaining model for what, if such a thing exists, IELTS 10, 11 or beyond might sound like. Apologies for the audio, which only gets 5.5 as we were up on the roof and it was a bit windy. This is the first of a series of IELTS interviews with semi-famous people; in coming weeks, I’ll be speaking to Lawrence from Denim, Justine from Elastica and the drummer from Ride about why old buildings should be preserved, the usefulness of mobile phones and how uniquely annoying it is to hear 16 candidates in a row all use the phrase ‘global village’ at least five times each.

*A bit like Russell Brand.

**I’m aware that this sentence could have been phrased more elegantly.

 

Donald Trump’s an alcoholic, isn’t he.

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“Let’s see…I’ve still got some of that brandy the Saudis gave me…”

Election Night 2010 left me in a Very Bad Mood. Seeing the disaster that had befallen the country, with the Conservative Party and their eventual suitors the Liberal Democrats effectively wiping Labour off the board, knowing that in government David Cameron would very soon stop pretending he would be the “greenest ever” Prime Minister/friend-to-all-the-woodland-creatures and start gleefully ripping apart all that was most precious about British life, I changed my Facebook status to the (ahem) unambiguously jestful ‘I think I might kill myself’.

I should have included a link to something related to the election. When I turned on my phone the following morning around 7am my phone was buzzing like crazy with messages from concerned friends, family and acquaintances. Not nearly as many as I might have expected, but still.

I would never have done it had I been sober. Watching the results in the pub with fellow campaigners for our local far-left candidate had been a despondent affair. I guess I must have thrown caution to the wind and probably had six or seven pints to numb the disappointment and then a whisky or two (I hate whisky) to make the short walk home slightly more fun.

I’ve cut back in the last few years on what a friend calls ‘combat drinking’. Up to a certain age getting inappropriately drunk just for the hell of it ceased to be a permanently hilarious jape and started to look and feel like the sort of lifestyle trajectory that leads to sitting in church halls reminiscing about the nights you spent searching through bins just in case they contained a not-entirely-empty can of Strongbow.

Then, of course, there’s the danger inherent in being addled online. My previous blog died a slow, painful death after I got into the bad habit of sharing my late-night weed-fuelled mental meanderings with the world (or, at least, my website’s dwindling fanbase). I suspect that it may well be the eventual fate of pretty much all blogs to end up as a receptacle for posts whose contents are so unidentifiable that even people with 18 years of solid alcoholism behind them would think twice before imbibing them*.

Thankfully I never did any permanent damage, either to my liver (apparently) or to my reputation. I’m not remotely famous, so embarrassing myself online (as I may be doing right now) has never worried me unduly. I’d imagine that if I somehow found myself in a position of global responsibility it would be helpful to take the edge off with an occasional drink, and there is always the possibility that in these panoptical times that could lead to serious trouble.

Remarkable, then, that the most powerful person in the world has never even tasted alcohol and is apparently able to deal with the stresses of the job with nary a drop of inebriating liquid to help him come down from the inevitable highs and lows of adrenaline that the job entails. Curious, as Hasan Minhaj recently pointed out, that Trump’s barely coherent and often catastrophically unwise 3am tweets are written in a state of total lifelong sobriety.

How on earth is the President of the United States able to combine his laudable dedication to a teetotal lifestyle with the pressures inherent in a) his status of leader of the free world in a time of geopolitical chaos and b) his condition as a pathological liar?

Errrrrrr…

Cheers!

* I’m aware this is quite a confusing sentence, maybe I should have a drink and think about how to rephrase it.

NB: There’s also of course the possibility that Trump is a bit like Obelix, as in ‘Asterix &…’. Obelix fell into the pot of superstrength-granting magic potion as a child, and thus unlike his little moustachioed buddy never requires a top-up before going into battle. He does, however, need constant reminding of this fact, and given that Trump has no memory for anything but slights and grudges, it’s unlikely he’d be capable of remembering that he’s not actually supposed to drink. He may also just be a dry drunk. I don’t really care, I just hope that he gets to hear the malicious rumours that he’s an alcoholic and the resultant rage, shame and anguish cause him to suffer a massive heart attack and die. At this point we have to try everything – it’s him or the planet. Speaking of which, do you really think that someone prepared to lie about something as significant as Climate Change should be believed when he says he doesn’t drink?!

(Incidentally, no offense to actual alcoholics is intended in or by this article. Many of my closest friends are borderline alcoholics. For some reason.)

You know what sells really well online? False hope.

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This site’s most popular post (‘Donald Trump is going to snap, and here is how I know‘) was twenty times more popular than any other*. It was so widely shared and liked because it offered comfort at a particularly desperate moment. It was also published in various other more august locations and, bizarrely, led to several people googling “is Infinite Concidence reliable?”.

Well, the fact that I wrote it in less than an hour in my pyjamas might cast some doubt on its veracity. I think people found it so convincing because I used a number of powerful quotes from the fancypants psychoanalytical theorist Jacques Lacan and also because the title expressed such conviction.

It stood out in the frenzied and permanently overheated market for positive or at least reassuring headlines. Some outlets cater specifically to such a demand. In this trenchant takedown of the pro-Corbyn website The Canary, Richard Seymour identifies what’s so worrying about this tendency for demand-driven news which sells itself to our emotions. Even when the writers and editors are on our side such sites’ purposeful misrepresentation of events should concern everyone.

My site (this one) doesn’t pretend to be a news site but some things I post here can be mistaken for news articles, particularly when I bang out a bad-mooded hot take satire. One recent piece that wasn’t satirical but was based around very recent events was this one. It originally had a poor choice of headline (‘Could the Tories throw the election to escape responsibility for Brexit?’, to which the obvious answer is, er, no), and once a couple of readers had drawn my attention to the fact that the title didn’t represent the content I changed it. However, it remains posted in various Facebook groups with the same irresponsible headline, and as such has proved consistently popular. The (risible) notion that the Tories might throw an election they’re almost bound to win gives people false hope.

So many headlines these days promise to provide false hope or assuage rational fears. The ‘content’ that they advertise may not qualify as ‘false news’ but they do present hearsay as fact in a way that any professional journalist would immediately recognise as wilfully misleading and irresponsible. Motivated entirely by commercial considerations in the frenetic attention-impulse economy of the internet, they play on feelings rather than any rational assessment of the facts, with no or very little empirical basis. They are Barnum-style headlines, confirming the truth of whatever you choose to believe. A journalist friend of mine is very entertaining on the subject of blogs like mine, with their (our) assemblage of guesswork presenting constant insult to basic journalistic standards and conventions.

Dealing with news media nowadays demands much more careful and critical reading. As I argued at length here in another piece of guesswork, we need news outlets we can broadly trust. For this reason I blanch whenever I see the term ‘MSM’ (‘mainstream media’). Clearly media literacy involves awareness of such issues as misrepresentation, bias and framing. But bracketing together the Mail and Sun with The Guardian and the NYT is not an example of media literacy, but rather an instance of credulity**. In trying to make sense of British society it’s essential to recognise Murdoch and Dacre are not dissimilar to Mugabe in their attempts to control the political agenda. However, to pretend that the Guardian – for all its growing submission to commercial constraints and its occasional perpetuation of churnalism – is engaged in the same task is puerile and self-defeating. Progressives have to have a much more sophisticated and critical understanding of the media and the role of journalists, ownership and so on than Donald Trump does. His attacks on the free press take advantage of a mood of cynicism which is partly inspired by a lazy misapplication of Chomsky’s work. There’s nothing sophisticated about avoiding news headlines. Anyone doubting the truth of this should consider when the last time they confronted recent facts relating to the earth’s climate. It is an increasingly scary world but hiding from the consequences of our actions is not an adult response and it particularly behoves those of us with children to at least inform ourselves as to what is going on.

In relation to the impending election (in the debate around which our overheating planet has once again barely been mentioned), there is a miniscule chance, were the apparent momentum to continue, that Labour could sneak a victory. It would nonetheless require monumental effort. They have won the campaign but from such a low base of both support and expectation that they are still extremely unlikely to win a majority of seats. Having just spent a week in the UK, I haven’t noticed anyone getting excited in a way that would suggest the tide has actually turned with sufficient force.

Facebook posts like the one above (from a pro-Corbyn group) make me think it isn’t going to happen. They suggest to me that the most excitable are also the least likely to be active offline talking to potential voters. Actual reports from actual doorsteps suggest that, like it or not, resistance to Corbyn himself is palpable. Then there are pieces like this from responsible commentators, acknowledging the shift in mood but recognising that it almosr certainly won’t be sufficient. Most responses to the above post expressed hope that it was the case, but actually what they were not hope but optimism, not on what is true but what should be. But crossed fingers and closed eyes do not win elections.

What online Labour groups should be doing right now is not encouraging unfounded optimism but sharing tales from the doorstep and tips for how to argue with racists and those who don’t trust men with beards. They should also – and this does happen, just not nearly enough in my view – be organising groups of people to go campaigning, with those who live in safe seats offering to go to nearby constituencies that could do with a hand. It seems depressing and significant that few mention where in the country they are. 

Of course in many cases those desperate for any sign of hope are experiencing profound anxiety about the result and looking for reasons to get through another day. We are all vulnerable, but disabled people and pretty much all immigrants are right to be terrified. If the Tories win it is going to be absolutely horrible.

Voting in ten days’ time will not enough to stave off the most reactionary government of our lifetimes. Everyone who wants and needs Labour to win needs to get together with their local party and go canvassing. I myself am a partial hypocrite, in that I live in Italy so my involvement is by definition very limited. Knocking on the doors of my neighbours feels a bit moot. My Italian’s ok but wherever you live there is absolutely no point talking to anyone who doesn’t have a vote.

In any case, if I were in London I wouldn’t campaign for Labour in my constituency (Hackney South & Shoreditch). The result is always a foregone conclusion. I would find a constituency where they need help, volunteer, ask about local issues and then go banging on doors. Due to the iniquitous nature of the British Electoral System it may be the case that the candidate I’d be canvassing for wouldn’t be a Labour one, although given that the failure of the attempt to change that system can be laid squarely at the door of the former leader of the Liberal Democrats I’d be less likely to campaign for them than I would the Greens, Plaid or the SNP.

I suspect that a lot of recent Labour converts have little experience or knowledge of election campaigning. Some need to seek guidance. Sadly the current leadership doesn’t seem to be very adept at working the party machine, which does after all contain the odd Blairite gremlin. I’ve canvassed in several elections and I know that it requires humility and patience, things that do not abound in online politics. Engaging with often grumpy electors is painstaking and sometimes gruelling, but it does mean you’re actually participating in the election rather than just commenting from the digital fringes, where the only reason anyone might pay attention is if they already agree. Nevertheless, if Labour is to stand a chance of forming the next Government, lots of people who currently have no intention of voting will have to be persuaded to do so. That’s your job.

*That second post being a follow-up to the first one, and in turn twenty times more popular than the third most read article. Thankfully at that point the ‘rule of twenties’ breaks down.

** Certain individual BBC journalists, on the other hand, do see it as their responsibility to destroy the Labour Party’s chances of success. Emma Barnett in particular is a shining example of total unprofessionalism.

Want to defeat the Tories? Get offline. Canvass.

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It’s no exaggeration to say that should the Conservative Party win in June Britain will experience the most rabidly right-wing government ever as it enters the most fraught period of its modern history. For all that the Tories have no plan for dealing with Brexit – nothing remotely plausible or mature, in any case – they will go on a shock doctrine rampage, trying to reverse all the social, cultural and political gains of the last 70 years.

Corbyn’s speech on terror was considered and reasonable, and outside the slavish Tory press it seems to have been well-received. May’s attempt to misrepresent its content went so far beyond what is normally acceptable in political discourse that it exposed her as little more responsible than Donald Trump. If she continues on this trajectory over the next week she’ll end up demanding that Corbyn be locked up. The revelations of the last few days that her department overlooked the danger represented by the terrorist are now fair game and given that she was prepared to politicise the bombing in such a cynical manner, Labour should exploit them to the full. They took off the gloves and Labour is now (in theory at least) in a position to deliver a series of deft kicks to the chin.

The Tories are currently on the run as Labour enjoys a much more succesful campaign than anyone anticipated. From fox-hunting to social care, the Tories are increasingly recognised as the party of dishonesty and cruelty. 

Still, the tangible shift in mood is probably not enough for Labour to win. The absolute priority now is to encourage people to vote against the Tories, even if they’re not enthusiatic about voting for Labour. What Labour needs now is people knocking on doors spreading word of its most popular policies and directly countering negative impressions of its leader. In doing so they need to stick to the script as defined by the leadership. 

The Tories will be employing all the dirty tricks they used in the referendum. They are already flooding Facebook with individually-targetted ads spreading outright disinformation. Obviously such messages need to be countered online, but that is not where the election will be won. Those who instead of engaging in politics on the doorstep spend all their time whinging and gossiping in their social media bubbles are not helping the cause. Particularly useless – indeed, actively counterproductive – are those spreading puerile conspiracy theories about the Manchester bombing. Arguing that May’s department overlooked the bomber is absolutely different from claiming that they deliberately allowed it to happen, and anyone suggesting the latter should be directly challenged and condemned. They are just as much of an embarrassment to the party as anti-semites.

Labour’s slim chance of winning rests upon everyone who wants it to win canvassing, leafletting, and talking to real people – friends, colleagues and family. Clearly, anyone in a marginal seat or where Labour stands no chance, needs to grit their teeth and vote for the anti-Tory candidate. For those of us actively appalled by Corbyn’s atrocious leadership over Brexit, a resounding victory for the SNP north of the border will strengthen our case. 

Almost unbelievably given the situation a few weeks ago, the Tories can be defeated, but those of us who dearly want that to happen need to join forces with those knocking on doors. Just voting won’t be enough, and ranting online is so close to useless as to make no meaningful difference*.

*I’m aware of irony, thanks.

Did Sean Hannity murder S*th R*ch?

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Does this man even exist?

Did the Fox News broadcaster Sean Hannity kill the DNC employee S*th R*ch? I’m not at liberty to say. I only know what my senses tell me and what I hear from trusted sources. But if what I’m hearing is even 1% factual, then there are grave questions to be asked. Of course, you won’t see this in the mainstream media. They only tell you what you they want you to know. So ask yourself these fifteen crucial questions:

1. Why isn’t the MSM talking about the possibility that Sean Hannity murdered S*th R*ch? Why hasn’t this question been raised in the so-called liberal press or on MSNBCCNN? What are they hiding? Is the fact that there is no evidence for such an absurd proposition being used to justify silence on the matter?

2. Why aren’t there any Turkish restaurants in Mexico City? There was one, called Istanbul, in Polanco. It closed down in 2014. Why?

3. Why is Fox News trying to silence the story? They’ve shut down Bill O’Reilly and (according to some sources) had a hand in getting rid of Roger Ailes. (Don’t fall for that bullshit story about ‘death’. I’ve never ‘died’ and I suspect you haven’t either.) Maybe there’s something they’re not telling us. How long is a piece of string? Why won’t they tell us?

4. How can José Mourinho claim this year has been a ‘success’ for Manchester United when they didn’t even finish in the top 5? Could this somehow be connected to the death of S*th R*ch? No, obviously not. Why not? What are they hiding?

5. How is Sean Hannity so well-informed and sure of his sources? He knows more about it than the family, investigators who have looked into the murder in exhaustive detail and the FBI. Was he there, on the spot? Is it true that Hannity is regularly in the habit of burgling Washington apartments/is part of the Illuminati/works for the CIA/etc? Who would even suggest such things?

6. Is it possible to make good hummus if you don’t have any tahini? Of course ‘they’ will tell you that tahini is an ‘ingredient’ of hummus. Maybe it’s time you started to question what they tell you.

7. Why has Sean Hannity just chosen to take a ‘vacation’? They say it’s for something called ‘Memorial Day’, which sounds fishy. I’d never heard of such a day until last week, partly because I’m not American. Maybe it’s all part of the cover-up.

8. Why aren’t there any Memorial Day films, or movies as you people call them? It’s a good couple of years since Wes Anderson made a new film, isn’t it? Have you asked why? Why not? Why hasn’t Wes so-called Anderson made a film set in and around Memorial Day? Could the reason be connected to Pizzagate? What?

9. Does ‘Sean Hannity’ even exist? I’ve certainly never seen his ‘show’, except for some clips on the internet. We don’t get Fox News US in the UK. Why not? What are they hiding from us?

10. Given that Sean Hannity doesn’t exist, how can ‘advertisers’ be withdrawing from his ‘show’? Do these ‘companies’ even ‘exist’? What about their ‘products’? Do you remember ever buying any commodities you saw advertised during the commercial breaks on ‘Sean Hannity”s ‘show’? I certainly haven’t, partly because I’ve never seen it. I’m calling bullshit on this, for no reason whatsoever.

11. Why isn’t the mainstream media, which I don’t watch or read so I have no way of knowing whether or not this is true, broadcasting or printing blatant falsehoods with regard to the death of S*th R*ch? What’s their interest in insisting on the truth of the whole affair and respecting the wishes of his bereaved family? Why don’t they dedicate airtime and column inches to promoting baseless conspiracy theories invented by right-wing crackpots and internet trolls in the attempt to disrupt public debate? Why can’t they just report verbatim whatever inflammatory attention-seeking nonsense that cupboard-dwelling sex pest troll Julian Assange has come up with without investigating first whether or not it has any actual basis in fact? Can’t we just scrap the First Amendment and jail anyone who even mentions the fact that Trump and his team are in hock to the Russians?

12. Whatever Alex Jones says.

13. If something could conceivably be true, does that mean it is true, even when there is no evidence to support it apart from what politically-motivated people with no journalistic credentials whatsoever posted on the internet?

14. More of whatever Alex Jones says. Even though he himself recently swore in court that he’s nothing but a performance artist who makes things up for effect.

15. Did Hillary Clinton order the murder of Seth Rich? No. If you think she did, you really need to grow up and start reading a proper newspaper written for adults by professional journalists rather than, with unerring gullibility, believing any old self-serving, dishonest and manipulative conspiracy theory bullshit you come across online. Now piss off, I’m off out to take my baby daughter for a stroll in the sunshine. I hope we don’t get shot dead by the Clintons. FFFS.

Our Daughter vs. Trump: The First Foreign Trip

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It just so happens that our baby daughter’s very first trip abroad coincides with that of her partial counterpart Donald Trump. I would venture that so far hers has been more successful on a number of fronts.

Her itinerary is less ambitious than Trump’s. Instead of Riyadh, Jerusalem, Rome and Brussels, we’re playing safe with London and Sheffield, and instead of exasperated world leaders she’s meeting friends and family. The level of excitement in one single household in Sheffield right now is far greater than it is in the whole of Belgium for Trump’s visit. To be fair one does have to pity those who’ve always dreamt of meeting the US President and are then faced with the prospect of humouring someone who thinks he’s won top prize in an amaaazing reality TV show and who would struggle to remember the colour of the White House. Trump knows at some level that he is ‘President’ but has no idea what that means beyond the fact that he gets more ice-cream than anyone else and can bomb or sack anyone who annoys him (or, more realistically, whoever Steve Bannon tells him to). As for our daughter, the fact that she is thankfully even cuter in real life than media reports (well, photos) means that no one has yet expressed any disappointment or anger at her presence.

Journey. Despite months of anxiety about the possibility of her destroying several hours of the lives of total strangers, our trip from Rome Ciampino to London Stansted was trouble-free. Obviously she travelled by Ryanair rather than Air Force One, but the difference doesn’t mean as much to her as it presumably would to Trump. We did however actually almost miss the plane, but that’s because I was so busy showing her and my Portuguese off to some Brazilians we didn’t notice that there were two planes departing for the same destination 15 minutes apart. The biggest tantrum was also my doing, as I didn’t react in a particularly grown-up fashion to the refusal of the vending machine to dispense me either a Snickers or the €2 I’d just paid for it. Unlike on Trump’s journey to Saudi Arabia, no one spent the entire flight screaming at other passengers about leaks, and luckily there were no physical leaks, which may, conversely, not be true of the US President.

Entourage. Our daughter is travelling with her parents and some carefully selected playthings, as opposed to a ragbag of white supremacists, arms dealers and leading members of secretive Hungarian far-right organisations. The toys themselves seem to get along reasonably well, with no backstabbing and nothing you could call nepotism. Mr Gweenery is not currently under suspicion of setting up a sweetheart hotel-building deal with leading members of the Chinese central comittee. At least, not as far as we know.

Travelling. Our daughter has no understanding of where she is. Cities and planes are totally unfamiliar concepts, mere adult abstractions. It’s just more world stuff, which happily contains a continuing supply of nappies, cuddles and milky-wilky. Intriguingly, she does not seem to connect transport with movement, shifting in time with travelling in space. To his credit, at least Trump seems to have understood that he was in the Middle East at some point. Mind you, his world is just an endless array of blandly opulent hotel interiors with gold fittings, with steak and ketchup permanently on the menu, Fox News always on the TV and just the occasional diaper to hand just in case.

Tiredness. Just like the US President, such a gruelling schedule for someone of her age has caused occasional bouts of mental and physical exhaustion. I’d like to apologise to anyone in or near the Moroccan restaurant in Exmouth Market around 2.40pm yesterday afternoon, and anyone on or in the vicinity of the 16.32 from Farringdon to Sutton on the same day. Luckily she is denied access to social media so she can’t  share her meltdowns with the wider world. I suspect that White House staff would find it much easier to deal with her than with the manchild they’re supposed to be nursing.

Reception. At every stage of her foreign trip she’s largely been greeted with goodwill, even delight. She hasn’t been confronted with any protests, nor would one expect a four-month-year old to be. There are no photos in which someone’s looking at her as though she’s an utterly insufferable creature. I think this Pope might actually be very good with children.

Result of trip. The world is not a significantly less stable place as direct consequence of her visit to the UK. She hasn’t conducted any major arms deals with extremely dangeous countries (that’s the sort of thing that new parents have to watch out for). At the same time, she hasn’t learnt anything about terrorism, the Holocaust or Climate Change, but then neither, to be fair did President Trump on his trip.

Manchester: Some reflections

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Here are some hopefully not too glib or hasty thoughts on the Manchester atrocity.

Of all possible universes, in what fucked-up galaxy does someone sit and watch a concert surrounded by innocent children having the time of their lives and then blow them all up? It seems to be the same appallingly misaligned solar system in which people walk into crowded marketplaces with backpacks containing tightly packed and condensed death. After all, similarly barbaric events regularly take place in Damascus, Baghdad and Istanbul. However, for us the Manchester bombing is close to home in several ways. We now have a baby daughter who seems to love music and one day will want to be taken to her first gig. The concert in question is exactly the kind of event my young nieces dream of attending. The social context is all too imaginable, although the grief is almost impossible to contemplate.

Reports describe thousands of people running in blind panic from the sudden carnage, running for the exits. Fleeing is among the basic instincts we possess, and it’s profoundly human to (as many did) offer protection and comfort to the survivors. Thus it would be horribly ironic if the shockwaves from the attack were to rebound on others who have escaped larger theatres of violence. Those who seek to instrumentalise the tragedy, to conduct a banal symphony of hatred against people seeking refuge from other sites of indiscriminate mass murder should be treated with absolute contempt. Hate preachers such as Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins have much more in common with the people who planned and carried this out than with those who died, regardless of their nationality. As for The Sun, in addition to hosting Hopkin’s call for refugees to be massacred en masse, it recently had on its front page a photo of a child refugee along with a demand for his teeth to be checked so his age could be verified. Their mawkish coverage of this event puts me in mind of Oscar Wilde’s comment about sentimentality being the bank holiday of cynicism*.

Like any rational person, I hope they do track down the psychopaths who radicalised the murderer and interrogate all those he came into contact with. There’s little point looking at the Koran for clues to what inspired such evil. After all, the Bible is just as violent. A better indication as to what draws young men to violence is to be found in this recent must-read article on the pull of nihilism:

This self-destructive dimension has nothing to do with the politics of the Middle East. It is even counterproductive as a strategy. Though Isis proclaims its mission to restore the caliphate, its nihilism makes it impossible to reach a political solution, engage in any form of negotiation, or achieve any stable society within recognised borders.

It’s reported that the presumed killer spent time in Libya, and was possibly trained there. Maybe that’s where he acquired and developed his taste for death. Just as it’s very difficult to read about the experiences of those in the Arena, it’s extremely hard to face up to what’s going on there. Countless thousands are held in Isis-run camps in Libya, where they are summarily tortured and killed. I’ve met several people in Rome who escaped. There is a sense in which European citizens are happy for such camps to exist as long as the people in them are thereby prevented from clambering onto rickety boats and trying to reach safety here. We can choose to look away from what is happening but doing so puts in a similar category to German civilians who knew something untoward was going on in the K.Z.. At least they were scared about speaking out. We don’t have that excuse.

I found the BBC coverage of the aftermath of the bombing appalling. There was a total failure to put what had happened into any context. There is a stupid idea prevalent in TV media in particular that attempts to explain events are the same as excuses. This presumably explains why there was a total lack of experts offering some attempt at making sense of the horror. The main news story on BBC London opened with random people on the street offering their feelings of rage and solidarity. Clearly no blame attaches to those people, but the Dianafication of this extremely serious episode is regrettable. We have a duty to address these events in an adult way, at the same time as seeking a means to explain such evil to our children. That doesn’t mean it’s the job of the BBC to treat its grown-up viewers like infants.

At least there was one BBC interviewee who in response to an asinine question from the reporter pointed out that the majority of Isis’ victims are not Europeans but Muslims in the Middle East. Please let’s not fall into the trap of thinking the life of an Iraqi child is worth less than that of a British one, that a bombing of a concert in Manchester is worse than a bomb in a Baghdad marketplace.

Of course, there is the urgent question of how the terrorist got hold of the bomb material. He may well have been trained in the Middle East. As it happens, the US Government has just sold $100,000,000,000 worth of death material to a country which is currently committing genocide in a neighbouring country. It also happens to be the nation that sponsored the atrocity which gave birth to the war on (and of) terror.

One hundred billion dollars buys a lot of Manchesters. It’s a huge investment in murdered sons and daughters, some of them our own. And the arms-dealing President, who hates all Muslims except those who have large amounts of money to invest in pure evil, has more in common with the Manchester terrorist than he does with his victims. As for our own Government, it has made it abundantly clear that basic protection of our lives and freedoms is no longer a priority.

*Although the cynicism of tabloid editors is far surpassed by that of the ‘false flag’ scumbags who claim that the dead children never existed in the first place. People who spread such repugnant nonsense are probably nihilistic enough to go and join Isis, but too lazy and scared to do so, so they find easier and safer ways to destroy lives.

America does not need a younger, leaner Donald Trump

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At the airport I see a copy of Bloomberg Businessweek which poses on its cover the stark question: If America were a company, would you keep this CEO?

Such a worldview is so ingrained that even in the face of its unavoidable and catastrophic failure it somehow stumbles on, eyes burnt out and arms outstretched, groaning for more brains – smarter ones in presumably less decrepid bodies. Even a sterling Democrat like Michael Bloomberg, with his sincere and laudable statements about Climate Change and sanctuary cities, is unable to see beyond it. For almost a decade American TV viewers were sold the idea that their country needed a CEO, and that pitch was accompanied by the face and the voice of the country’s most iconically successful ‘business leader’. Enlightened neoliberals like Bloomberg must surely be starting to understand that it is their zombie ideology of letting the market run rip through all institutions that has led to this point, that in order for democratic values to remain intact prices have to be kept at bay. The problem is not that the Presidency was sold to the wrong person. The problem is that if we think of the country as a corporation the most brutal corporate interests will govern and destroy every aspect of our lives. Those who argued that there was nothing to choose between Macron’s Neoliberalism and Le Pen’s barely disguised fascism were absolutely wrong, but genuine liberals – of which Bloomberg is undoubtedly one – urgently need to be reminded of one of Mussolini’s most terrfying definitions of fascism: the point at which corporate and state power are indistinguishable.

Why I avoid Twitter

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Cartoon from xkcd.com.

My memories of the few times I’ve lost my temper about politics when talking to strangers IRL are mostly shameful to the point of trauma. In a cottage in the west of Ireland in early 1999, I was introduced to a friend of the couple I was visiting. I’d worked with my Dublin friend Barry in the kind of stupid software call centre job which everyone was only pretending to pretend that they were doing. He was hugely witty, sharing my predilection for massive acts of seditious timewasting and tactical work avoidance. He was also teeming with goodwill, even towards the idiots phoning up, and was massively gifted in terms of Scandinavian languages and various forms of stringed instrument. I was one of the first people with whom he shared the news that he and his Swedish girlfriend Ana were going to have a baby. However, I don’t want to dwell on self-pity because I wasn’t the victim, but rather the protagonist of an attack of rage. I have no idea what it was all about. Maybe the integrity of the Irish Labour Party. Or the Millennium Bug. Or EU piscine policy and its relation to the price of fish. Regardless of the content, the form was drunken shouting. All that mattered was winning. I regret the whole incident, not so much for its consequences (I never saw my friends again) but because my behaviour was just plain wrong. I was subsequently too ashamed and they were (I presume) too angry to contact me again. I’d ruined a valuable friendship and been a total prick to someone who definitely didn’t deserve it and could herself have become a friend.

There have been other times (not recently, I’m pleased to say). One New Year’s Eve a couple of years ago I got angry with the partner of a friend for excoriating Jeremy Corbyn. Luckily I knew by then that I had a choice, that although I could if I wished give in to the seductive impulse to let my blood boil over, to allow myself off the leash, it was wrong in the fullest sense to do so. On that occasion I was able to reign myself in and treat a fellow human being who happened to hold a slightly different opinion with respect rather than scorn.

Unless (as I often need to remind myself) you’re dealing with someone whose sole motive is to abuse, annoy or in some other way antagonise you, it’s far better to identify points of agreement and try patiently to move forward from them, no matter how swampy or thorny the territory. While it can be great fun to throw off the constraints of politeness, in any sort of meaningful social reality there is no way that you can or should do so. We are after all civilised creatures, socially interdependent beings. Only if you actively want to alienate yourself from a particular social group can you rant and rave to (as it were) your hate’s content.

The first rule of civil debate is not to attack the person themselves. In an attack of rage there’s always an element of the personal. Fury always seeks a target, and almost always finds the wrong one. That’s what’s refreshing about Twitter. There are no real people, only avatars. Thus it doesn’t matter if you hurt someone. It doesn’t matter if someone unfollows, mutes or blocks you, or vice versa. Or, when you prefer, you can join in on ripping to shreds someone who, on the basis on fiften or sixteen words at most, appears to deserve it. Jon Ronson’s book ‘So you’ve been publicly shamed’ is an excellent primer on how pile-ons can resemble rapidfire pogroms or instant witchhunts. Taking part in such orgies of digital violence is like participating in a Milgram experiment being conducted on a planetary scale and producing much the same results. As a Twitter user you have your own microfascist coup at you fingertips: you can eradicate dissent with the tiniest gesture of the thumb. And, of course, trolling is huge fun, creating an imaginary audience for your savage japes, while all the time alert to the danger of being trolled yourself. Thus we all get to be bullies, and then when called out on it pretend to be victims. Or often we’re long gone by that point. We never see our victims again but did they even exist in the first place? Twitter is a world without moral consequences, rather like a dark room of hate.

How am I so sure of this? It’s a game I’ve happily played in the past. My own life on Twitter has gone through several stages, including more than one phase of outright addiction. I used to see myself as scourge of Britain’s far-right, and wasted several months of my life trying to reason with people opposed to reason itself. I was also guilty of all the bad habits described in the previous paragraphs until eventually (in the day after the Brexit referendum, my wife reminds me, when it was clear that the far-right had basically won) I finally deleted my account, which at that point had a balance of around 1,200 followers (who for comedy purposes I referred to as my disciples) and around 47,124,132 mostly angry tweets. I was drawn in again recently by the sweet opium smell of Trump’s catastrophic presidency. Although, of course, Twitter is not so much opium but crack cocaine. Over the course of a few intensely fruitless days I went on a binge, throwing the odd firecracker into rooms that may have been empty, hoping to hear an explosion. It was not by any standards an edifying or improving experience.

If you search for mentions of Trump on Twitter you see immediately that there are two worlds that only skirmish and very rarely engage in any meaningful way. The next civil war is being rehearsed, this time first as farce and then quite possibly (almost inevitably at this stage) as tragedy. Viewed as a game, Twitter is a first-person shooter, in which the main activity is sniping. It involves as little human engagement as two people sticking their heads above opposing walls, acknowledging each other’s existence only insofar as they’re trying to eradicate each other. Just like a baby wishing its parents dead because it has no sense of what that might mean, if I’m arguing on Twitter I want to annihilate the other person.

Then there’s the question of time. A few years ago there was a story doing the rounds about a Korean couple who were so busy raising their virtual baby that their real one died. I didn’t quite get to that point over the last week, but I did come close to falling into that mysterious black hole of time that, as Thomas Pynchon puts it, produces most internet content. Twitter is an intensified form of social media in that even more than Facebook it rewards minimal effort with an infinite abundance of stimulation. My overuse leads to extreme irritability upon even momentary withdrawal. No wonder it is the perfect medium for Donald Trump.

Maybe it is the medium itself that’s the problem, maybe not. Some people make wonderful use of it, and by no means everyone uses it to track down and antagonise political adversaries. Perhaps in a better world where people were in a more cheerful mood…but I don’t think so. Much as has been written of Zuckerberg and Facebook, the ways in which his immature notion of friendship has come to dominate the world, Twitter doesn’t serve our needs, or at least not in any way which we can consider healthy. In my experience, the notion of social media as a community is risible. People in communities share various complex facets of their daily lives. For me, Twitter brings out the very worst side of me – the side which craves instant affrimation and adulation in return for very little imagination or effort, along with an aggressive and sadistic streak which I’d really rather not encourage. That’s why I deleted my account again and will endeavour not to get drawn in again in the future. Tl/dr: instant updates –> instant asshole.

Why can’t the USA be more like Saudi Arabia?!

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I’ve often been accused of political bias on this site, so to ensure balance I’ve asked my Trump-supporting friend Ralph to share his thoughts on the President’s visit to Saudi Arabia.

Like all Americans I’ve been mighty impressed by the royal welcome extended to our President Donald J. TRUMP in Saudi Arabia. They certainly know how to greet a world LEADER. They had fireworks, flypasts and US flags galore. The hotel where the Commander-in-Chief is staying was bedecked in images of President TRUMP and his Saudi counterpart. To quote a fellow PATRIOT on Twitter, seeing Trump’s triumphant arrival in the Middle East was akin to watching Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon*.

Such images must be hard to swallow for so-called American liberals. They were probably hoping he’d get a frosty reception. Instead the Saudis, rich and poor, have literally LAID OUT the red carpet for someone who they clearly see shares their values and view of the world.

Maybe THE DONALD will end up taking some inspiration from his hosts. Because you know something they don’t have in KSA? LIBERALS! And they certainly don’t have any time for FEMINISTS! Plus they’re not held back by a so-called ‘free’ press and fake political ‘parties’. As for PROTESTERS, they know how to deal with them! Nor will you find a member of the Saudi Royal Family telling you that the lives of black people ‘matter’, allowing women to drive motor vehicles, permitting Jews to own property, or campaigning for the rights of so called ‘transsexuals’ to go to the ‘bathroom’! What’s more, while we in the backward old US of A go through the same bullshit charade every four years of electing new faces to ‘run’ the country, in countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE (and who wouldn’t want to live in DUBAI?!) they just have the best FAMILIES take care of everything. And what better FAMILY do we have than the TRUMPS?

I’m sure that some of these ideas have already occurred to PRESIDENT TRUMP as he is driven along pristine streets from luxurious PALACE to sumptuous BANQUET with not a living demonstrator in sight. There’s so much that could be done to make the USA much more similar to KSA, and I’m sure that in Mike ‘Mad Mullah’ Pence and Steve ‘Al Jihadi’ Bannon he’s chosen the perfect team to move things in that direction. After all, any country that can secretly dispatch a group of dedicated, well-trained and above all BRAVE individuals to take down some of the most emblematic symbols of an enemy power must have some other great lessons to teach the world! LET’S MAKE AMERICA MEDIEVAL AGAIN! #TRUMPBINLADEN2020!! ALLAH AKBAR!!!

*Actual quote from Twitter.